Sunday, January 20, 2013

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Sunday that he does not believe
President Obama’s gun-control proposals will be brought to the Senate
floor for a vote.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Barrasso said election worries
among Democrats will sideline legislation that could restrict gun
ownership.

Obama has called on Congress to institute universal background checks
for all gun sales as well as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity
magazines, among other items.

“I don’t think Sen. Harry Reid [D-Nev.] even brings it to the Senate
floor because he has six Democrats up for election in two years in
states where the president received fewer than 42 percent of the votes,”
Barrasso said. “He doesn’t want his Democrats to have to choose between
their own constituents and the president’s positions.”

Don't blame us when gun laws fail, blame Red State Blue Dog Dems! Nice try, Tom. But America knows who to blame for constant, near total opposition: Republicans.

President Obama knows what he's doing here: the will of the American people.

And another key graph on the US deficit. As we've been discussing, the
US deficit as a percent of GDP has been declining, and will probably
decline to around 3% in fiscal 2015.

This graph shows the actual (purple) budget deficit each year as a
percent of GDP, and an estimate for the next three years based on
current policy (Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs estimates
the deficit will 3% of GDP in 2015). Note: With 7.8% unemployment,
there is a strong argument for less deficit reduction in the short term,
but that doesn't seem to be getting any traction.

Now there are a lot of if's here. And the big screaming question is "Why aren't we doing what we can to lower the unemployment rate?" And of course, the big screaming answer is "Republicans refuse to allow anything to be done."

But President Obama is reducing the deficit. It's dropping and continuing to drop.

The logic here is weirdly impeccable. The Republican Party’s dilemma
is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and
unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans
wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But
since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House
Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular
opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House
Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that
House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if
they don’t get their way on spending cuts. After all, if Mitt Romney had
won the election, the debt ceiling wouldn’t even be a question!

My colleague Michael Gerson wrote one of the earliest versions
of this column. As he put it, Obama “knows that Republicans are forced
by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he
can easily demagogue.” So he has, in a bid to “break his opponents,”
decided to “force the GOP to surrender on the debt limit, with nothing
in return” and to “require Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange
for any real spending reductions.”

In other words, it's just not fair that President Obama is hitting home runs off such juicy hanging fastballs the GOP nutjobs keep tossing over the plate. If President Obama really cared about bipartisanship, he'd surrender completely to the Republicans and stop making them look bad. Sure. And if college co-eds would stop wearing outfits like that...you get the picture. This is outright victim blaming, period.

What Obama should be doing in response, Brooks argues, is push
for policies that provoke no opposition even from the craziest of the
Republicans: “We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to
admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for
natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank.” Brooks argues that
these issues would be uncontroversial enough to “erode partisan
orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together.” Then,
maybe we could pass some laws under a future president.

Note that solving actual problems is besides the point here. Brooks is almost explicit about this. He begins with the need for initiatives that he thinks will lead to happiness and comity between the parties in Washington, and then comes up with policies that might fit the bill...

Here's the reality. Short of resigning from the Presidency along with Joe Biden and then putting John Boehner in the White House, there is nothing that President Obama can do that will make the Republicans like him. And if the Republicans get their way, pretty much every law in the last four years gets thrown out. "Just humor the lunatics" is not a viable governing strategy. "Getting rid of the lunatics" is.

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With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and President Obama coming to the end of his second term in the White House, there's still plenty of Stupid to fight on all sides with a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, two seemingly endless wars, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there still coming from both political parties, when we need solutions.

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